As the little girl grew, she suffered from the pangs of loneliness. She ostracized herself with her odd stories and her spells. She went looking for those beings that had once flown to her window and appeared in her dreams. Sometimes, she found them: in a person’s yard, in the scraps of woods she tried to lose herself in, in the snows of the second winter she’d ever lived through. But try as she might, there was no invitation to join them, no sparkling doors that glowed in a certain phase of the moon and with a certain spell. She hunted, and she begged, and she wept from loneliness.
And at the same time, she became somehow more rooted to the earth she’d spiraled into at birth. Friendship bracelets that tethered her, giggling girls in the clubhouse that warmed her heart. She clung to her friends and her family, especially when the world seemed small and cruel. She liked to go out back and climb her favorite tree on the days where it was too much. Her neighbors called her a squirrel, or a monkey, the way she clambered up the branches. Her tree-friend would hold her in his arms, and she was constantly covered in his sap and pine needles. Beastly. Sometimes the tree-man whispered about her wings, in that other place; he told her that hers were like butterfly wings, delicate and lovely, and that her skin shimmered gold. That’s how he saw her, he said. She wrapped her arms around him and fell asleep in his embrace.
When her parents took her back to the small town and the ocean, away from her friends and her tree, the girl raged.
The beings stopped coming to her entirely.
Her tree friend could no longer whisper in her ear.
The wind was silent with its secrets,
The ocean raged through the hurricanes and smashed ships.
So she went looking for another way out of this small, ugly place. She heard of potions and plants, grown by wizards and witches. They promised her freedom, and pocketed her money. And in that greenish haze, the strange skin that clouded her vision was ripped away. She saw that she was Fey, that she was beautiful and beloved, that the beings had never left her at all. In the drums she danced, moving her hips and tipping her head back in ecstasy.
They told her to be careful.
The wizards, the witches, they warned her.
But why not? Why not give in, she wondered, as she guzzled down their ambrosia?
Because after all… wouldn’t true love save her?
